Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, September 12, 2016

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.

PERVASIVE
SENSE OF PLACE

Recently I
reviewed on this blog Extraordinary
Anywhere, a collection of essays about the sense of specific place in New
Zealand. In one way or another, all the contributors were saying that where we
are born and grow up exerts a powerful influence upon who we are.

I confirm this
in a very personal way.

As I’ve noted
before on this blog [see the post Babblingof Green Fields], I spent the first 22 years of my life in the east
Auckland suburb of Panmure, right next to the Tamaki Estuary. Over forty years
ago, I married and moved to the other side of the city – in fact, to the North
Shore, where (apart from some trips and sojourns elsewhere) I have lived ever
since. I feel no particular nostalgia for where I grew up, and I do not feel a
desire to visit there any more than the calls of friendship require.

But I find this
curious phenomenon. On those occasions when I remember my night-time dreams, I
find that they take place in the house and neighbourhood where I grew up. Even
if I can decode my dreams as referring to events going on in my life now, the imagery is the imagery
of my childhood and teenage years. I am no psychologist, but I always interpret
this to mean that what is imprinted on our brains in childhood is what stays
most powerfully with us and is most often resorted to by the unconscious. It is
in childhood that we acquire the symbols of our personal emotional codes – a
particular dark night in childhood will always recur as a symbol of fear; the
strange sound of trains shunting on the other side of the Panmure Basin will
always stand for faraway places or perhaps loneliness; the sound of a
neighbouring printing press at work means comfort and security; a ceiling that
began to leak in the rain means uncertainty and insecurity; and so on.

Writing poetry
in particular, I find childhood still exerts a powerful pull. In my first
collection The Little Enemy (2011), I
included the following poem in honour of early teenage explorations of the
nearby estuary’s attractive mud. I was flattered when a year later the
craft-artist Ingrid Anderson chose to turn my images into two matching screen
prints, incorporating a plan of the estuary with a crab motif.

The poem goes as
follows:

TAMAKI ESTUARY

Walking
bare-footed on the estuary

to a
sour green river

over
mud, sucking heels and toes,

in
fear of lost fish-hooks;

crunching
fallen insect exo-skeletons

and
dead crustacean shells

where
live crabs have crawled and blundered, just like me,

sideways
and tentative,

under
the bare foot’s ball.

Mud.
Porous mud. Mud unstable and coaxing.

Mud
maternal. Mudbank

mud
in slippery life. Mud as dangerous

and
giving as the womb.

My
soft two-legged track will fill with water,

spread
and blur, each large print

the
spore of an amphibious yeti.

The
soaked land stinks,

the
river is a plain,

soup-green,
puke-green, snot-green.

I’m
upright on an unstable element

heading
for water, life,

the
relatively clean,

over
mud. Squelching mud. Mud under-esteemed.

Mud
malleable. Mud

digested
in the river’s throat and cast up.

Mud
fertile vomit

of
the two-way tide.

The Tamaki Estuary was a couple of
hundred yards east of my childhood home. If you looked due west from our front
window, you were looking across the Panmure Basin at a very distant view of One
Tree Hill. The most spectacular time to look in that direction was sunset (or
just after). I am certain that many more large flocks of birds flew over
metropolitan Auckland when I was a child than is the case now. City spread
means that nesting grounds are further and further from the central city and
its suburbs than they were fifty years ago. I have a distinct memory from
childhood of large flocks of birds flying towards the setting sun. I hope this
is not a trick of memory. Anyway, this fed into the following poem, which I
decided not to include in either of my two published collections so far. Maybe
it’s too raw a piece of protest. I know that an indigenous tree has now been
planted on One Tree Hill and this is taken to be culturally acceptable and we
are increasingly encouraged to speak of the hill as Maungakiekie. But I still
see the deliberate destruction of the exotic tree that was there as a piece of
vandalism. To me, the piece of vandalism says that my associations, as a
Pakeha, with this landscape mean nothing.

Here’s
the hitherto unpublished poem:

ONE TREE HILL

All childhood, seen through a picture window,

beyond the Panmure Basin and railway,

beyond suburbs, she was an umbrella

to a spike, arm to an upright, shelterer

of birds too distant to see, disruptor

of neat verticals, a swaying wind trap.

For us, sunset was her special time, when

she melted into the unviewable,

a twig in the blinding gold, or was crowned

by rays from heaven through dramatic clouds.

That was when the birds flew past us to her,

the named One Tree, their day’s end
destination.

She grew from the hill and was shaped by wind,

graceful beside the stark stone phallus, part

of the scene like clouds, sheep, birds or
sunset,

permanent as God. And now she’s gone, cut

for show, executed as an alien,

the hill reshaped to baldness and a pencil.

This is not your country, says the chainsaw.

You have no right to see, think, dream, be
here.

* *
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* * *
* * *
* * *
* * * *

It is always encouraging to be
noticed. This was Siobhan Harvey’s response to my second collection of poems,
in the Herald “Weekender” magazine on
Saturday 27 August: